Anyone who has attempted to arrange a meeting with a busy client or friend is familiar with the concept of phone tag. In phone tag, you try to reach your client or friend to set up a meeting but are forced to leave a message because the party you seek is either not around or on another line. Email doesn't often produce better results because your email messages may be received by an unmanned terminal or, while you wait on a response from an invitee, you are forced to cancel the very meeting you sought to set up due to a conflict only to receive an acceptance from your invitee shortly thereafter. These are difficulties typically associated with setting up a two party meeting. It is easy to see that such difficulties can grow exponentially when you have a multiparty meeting or seek to use resources simultaneously available to numerous others.
In an attempt to reduce these and other difficulties, a variety of calendaring and notification applications and utilities exist. However, along with the capabilities included in each are a number of limitations. For example, many web portals offer registered users the ability to maintain a calendar for their personal use. While such calendars are accessible from substantially any point where a user can access a web browser and the Internet, such calendars are limited in at least the aspect that they typically may be viewed only by the party to whom they belong, i.e., the registered user, and they make little to no provision for configuring one more levels of access control.
Likewise, programs such as Microsoft Outlook® and Lotus Notes® offer a variety of calendar specific capabilities as well as a number of associated functions, such as the ability to organize meetings, including managing invitee lists. However, like their web portal counterpart, such applications are also burdened by limitations. For example, Microsoft Outlook® permits users to share their calendar with delegates so long as the delegates are within the same organization as the calendar owner. Various other capabilities of Microsoft Outlook® are similarly limited in that they have usefulness solely within the organization in which the capabilities are based and little to no applicability outside the organization.